Promotional Items Corporate Gifts Srednarb – New SEO Contest

September, 19, 2008 at 6pm Pacific Time was the start of an SEO Contest organized mainly by Alfredo Palconit and invited members of the SEO Philippines community and has closed the competition to Filipinos only. The total amount of prizes is PHP275,000. In US Dollars, this is nearly $6,000 but is spread among various prizes each person can win. But if a competitor is good enough, and wins multiple prizes, they can win and try to maximize the cash they can get. Multiple entries are also allowed in this contest. Now what I like about this SEO contest where their rules are kind of different from others is:

Contest rules on the Domain/URL

The contest keyword is an amazing 5 words. But only 2 are allowed in the domain name entry. I guess this is good to give too much of a domain name advantage. I like this rule since often in SEO contest, who ever get the .com of the domain has a good advantage.
Example: http://www.promotionalitemscorporategiftssrednarbs.com is not allowed because all keywords are in the domain. But a domain like http://www.promoitemscorpgifts.com is allowed since only two keywords are included in the domain.

Subdomains containing keywords are not allowed. Only folders and filenames can have the keywords which I think is also a good rule. Although I don’t really believe in the big strength of the subdomain’s power in ranking, it still does have some advantage.

A competitor must own the domain name. This rule already filters out the blogspot and wordpress accounts that are knowned to rank higher in short amounts of time.

Contest Linking Rules

Of course all SEO contest has links to the sponsors/organizers of the contest. What is unique about this contest, is there are several link variations. And you have to choose at least 10 and they are deep linking. Very interesting since making it more varied and linking to various parts of a page makes the link building seem more natural.

Links are on the page for the whole contest duration. Good since some just place the links when it is near the end of the contest.

Now all the links should be above the fold on a 800×600 resolution. And this is wow, in the first place is who uses that resolution nowadays. And placing all 10 links in that small space will look like a main navigation in my opinion.

No Dynamic Pages

I like this rule. It eliminates the use of any popular CMS of any kind. Even your own CMS will not be allowed. And sometimes that is all the SEO some people know. They only know WordPress SEO, Drupal or Joomla SEO.

Sometimes the design of a site will help in link baiting. And some just rely on modifying existing free CMS templates to start with. This will show the well roundedness of a competitor.

Prizes for Traffic

Competitors are required to place their Google Analytics code and shared when contest ends. Which is needed for traffic awards.

All Hats In

Blackhat, Whitehat, Greyhat, whatever. Do whatever you want. Although having only static pages already limits a large amount of blackhat you can do, whatever blackhat techinques you have left, you can still use. I kind of understand this rule since it is hard to monitor and police. People can always claim they did nothing even if they did. And you can attack others claiming they did blackhat even if they didn’t. It’s just a hard policy to follow and make everyone 100% comply. Now if you get banned, then that’s your problem. My suggestion is keep it clean so even after the contest you still have a site and try to make money out of it in whatever way you can.

No Traffic/Lead Fraud

They claim they have their ways of determining this and it should not really be that hard. There are several patterns you can see in traffics and determine if traffic is really authentic.

More Prizes

They have good spread of prizes, for top traffic sites, top referrers, best built coding, highest ranking in Google, Yahoo and MSN/Live and highest overall ranking. Up to page 2 of Google has a prize.

Every Contest Entry Cannot Mention it is Part of an SEO Contest

I think this is a good rule. In fact I feel like I do not want to join another SEO contest that requires a new domain with keywords about SEO. I just can’t make another site about SEO. They are too many already. Which is why the Global Warming SEO contest was my favorite. Everything else is about SEO and that always sounds like spam the world to me.

The longest keyword phrase in a contest I have ever seen

Promotional Items Corporate Gifts Srednarb is a mouthful. WTH is srednarb? *LOL* Well it is an SEO contest. We have had others in the past that were also nonsense words.

Contest starts September 19, 2008 and ends a few days before Christmas on December 22, 2008 at 9pm Pacific Time. Good luck to all competitors. Click for more information on the Promotional Items Corporate Gifts Srednarb SEO Contest.

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